The lynching of a scrap trader sparked outrage across Bangladesh even as hundreds of students took to the streets here on Saturday accusing the interim government of failure to contain mob violence.
The police have arrested five persons, two of them with illegally possessed firearms in connection with the lynching of scrap dealer Lal Chand Sohag.
Students at multiple university campuses in the capital staged protest rallies over the lynching incident on Wednesday when extortionists lynched the scrap material trader Sohag in front of the Mitford Hospital in the Old Dhaka area.
A video of the incident that went viral on Thursday showed Sohag being lynched with chunks of concrete slabs and then, after confirming his death, the attackers virtually dancing on his body.
“Who gave you beasts the right to kill people? What is the interim (government) doing when extortionists are carrying out mayhem?” were slogans chanted by students in their campuses, witnesses and local media reports said.
Students of private universities such as the BRAC University, NSU, East West University and government-run Eden College staged the demonstrations on Saturday while the Dhaka University and Jagannath University erupted in protests soon after Lal’s brutal murder video went viral.
Newspaper Prothom Alo said a murder case was filed with Kotwali Police Station in the capital on Thursday by Lal Chand’s sister Manjuara Begum, 42. The case names 19 accused and includes another 15 to 20 unidentified suspects.
BDNews24 said a group of activists from the youth front of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) allegedly killed Sohag, who was also a former activist of the same outfit.
The party said it immediately expelled the four persons accused of lynching.
Meanwhile, home affairs adviser of the interim government, retired Lieutenant General Jahangir Alam Chowdhury said the police arrested five culprits, two with illegal firearms, and said that “the incident was very unfortunate for a civilised country”.
In another incident earlier this month, a woman and her son and daughter were beaten to death at central Cumilla’s Muradnagar area allegedly for their alleged involvement in drug dealing.
Bangladesh has seen a surge of mob killings since August 2024 when Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s 16-year-long Awami League regime was ousted in a violent movement spearheaded by the Students’ Against Discrimination (SAD).
The Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council on July 10 said the minority communities faced 2,442 incidents of communal violence in 330 days from
August 4, 2024, when the political unrest reached its peak eventually ousting the past regime.